Chandrayaan-1 Updates

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Chandrayaan-1 Launch Vehicle

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) built its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) in the early 90s. The 45 m tall PSLV with a lift-off mass of 295 tonne, had its maiden success on October 15, 1994 when it launched India's IRS-P2 remote sensing satellite into a Polar Sun Synchronous Orbit (SSO) of 820 km.

Between 1996 and 2005, it has launched six more Indian Remote Sensing satellites as well as HAMSAT, a micro satellite built by ISRO for amateur radio communications into polar SSOs, one Indian meteorological satellite into Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO).,

PSLV has also launched four satellites from abroad (TUBSAT and DLR-Bird from Germany, Proba from Belgium and KITSAT from Republic of Korea) as piggyback payloads into polar SSOs. PSLV has emerged as ISRO's workhorse launch vehicle and proved its reliability and versatility by scoring eight consecutive successes between 1994-2005 periods in launching multiple payloads to both SSO as well as GTO.

Considering the maturity of Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) demonstrated through PSLV-C4/KALPANA-1 mission, PSLV is chosen for the first lunar mission. The upgraded version of PSLV viz., PSLV-XL which has a liftoff weight of 316 tonnes, will be used to inject 1304 kg mass spacecraft at 240 x 24,000 km orbit and the corresponding spacecraft mass is 590kg when the target lunar orbit of 100 km is achieved.